A Pocketful of Miracles

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whatever her other capacities, demonstrated last week that she is a master at the poetic art of haiku -- the Japanese poem form that encapsulates in three or fewer lines of 17 or fewer syllables a larger thought or image.

Regarding the Democratic health care bill, she crafted the following haiku to assure the Blue Dog Democrats that they can tell their voters:

"(It) will mean a cap on your costs,

"but no cap on your benefits."

In just two lines of fewer than 17 syllables, the speaker has encapsulated the illogic inherent in the Democratic health care bills. It is a compound proposition that is always untrue for all possible combinations of the true value of its components. Under the Democratic bill, benefits would go up forever, but miraculously, the costs of those ever-increasing benefits never would go up even a cent -- even if our republic lasts for a thousand years.

This is a miracle to match the Lord's provision of loaves and fishes.

"And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.

"And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full.

"And they that had eaten were about five thousand men, beside women and children." -- Matthew 14:19-21

Of course, the speaker might retort, it was easy for Jesus because there was no Congressional Budget Office 2,000 years ago. And the CBO has outlawed miracles.

If the miracle had been scored by the CBO: Five thousand men plus 5,000 women plus 12,000 children (2.4 children per man and woman) at five people to a loaf and three people to a fish would require 4,400 loaves at $1 per loaf and 7,333 1/3 fish at $1.50 a fish. Total one-day cost of miracle: $11,001. Assuming daily provision -- annualized rate: $4,015,365. Ten-year budget, assuming no inflation or increase in benefit class: $40,153,650.

I suppose the speaker would argue that if the CBO had been present at the miracle, it would have been delegated to the scene by the Pharisees, who, as Josephus noted, were considered the most expert and accurate expositors of the law.

Tony Blankley, a conservative author and commentator who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the 1990s, when Republicans took control of Congress, died Sunday January 8, 2012. He was 63.

Blankley, who had been suffering from stomach cancer, died Saturday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, his wife, Lynda Davis, said Sunday.

In his long career as a political operative and pundit, his most visible role was as a spokesman for and adviser to Gingrich from 1990 to 1997. Gingrich became House Speaker when Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives following the 1994 midterm elections.

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